Vile these evil, sordid, miniature human beings who populate my brain, like living fingers with faces and souls. Some wear hats. People suffer. I suffer. Children wander. Women weep. Mothers lie on deathbeds. I am afraid — I have been afraid — a screaming, wailing, or sobbing might start at any instant inside my ears, be taken up by other tortured voices from within, and never stop. I would not know if I was imagining it. It would not matter. I would hear it. Minikins move, and I can feel them, and dirty, cynical old men with sharp crutches and pointy beards pass with insinuating glints in their cruel, unscrupulous eyes. They hurt. Ugolino eats a head: mine (that son of a bitch).
No one will help. (Only my wife's sister verges close enough to that delicate nerve of truth we want unbared, but her front is callous, her motives unkind, and I want to hit her.)
"Give the kid away," she as much as commands with taunting relish in her rasping, obtrusive way, attacking, pressing her advantage, and we must unite to resist her and beat her back.
"Good for you! It serves you right," is what I hear her snarling invidiously at us in my own voice and words. "I'm glad it happened. Ha, ha. I'm glad it happened to you because I know you, instead of to people I don't know who live far away."
I want to hit her because I feel she sees inside me and steals my thoughts, compelling me to repudiate them.
We want to get rid of him. We want to give him away. And need people in positions of respectable authority to tell us. We haven't nerve to do it alone. What will people we know think of us?
Unfeeling.
Inhuman.
We want to give him away and are afraid.
(Other people we hear about in Connecticut, New York, Long Island, and New Jersey intend to keep theirs. Why?)
"Don't," my wife's sister has warned consistently almost from the first day there was no longer any doubt (which was too soon). "Do it fast. Don't be hypocrites. The longer you wait, the worse it's going to be for everybody."
That suggestion was monstrous. (Hypocrisy was easier.)
"Don't say that again!" my wife flares up at her that last time. "I don't ever want to hear you say anything about it again to us, or I won't let you come here. I mean that."
"I've had it," I roar at my wife afterward. "I don't ever want to hear her talk about him again. Or about any of the other kids either. I'll throw her out if she does. If you won't tell her I will."
"I did tell her. You heard me. Did you think that was easy?"
"You're only reacting that way because you know I'm right," her sister had responded self-righteously.
"She was only trying to be helpful," my wife continues repentently. "Now I'm sorry I yelled at her."
"No, she wasn't. Do you think she was trying to be helpful? I wish she'd move to Arizona with your mother."
"Her store is here."
She is a seamy, murky inner lining of my wife's character that my wife has never been able to look at without retreating immediately into remorse. She is another underside of my own (that I am able to show often at home to my family and reveal to myself in daydreams with vindictive jubilation) just as Derek also is, in my occasional wish to be speechless and powerless again and wholly dependent once more on parents and big brothers and sisters. (Except that I would not want to be sent away to a home.) Everyone around me now reminds me of me. Even Kagle reminds me of me. (Green doesn't. I admire Green. Arthur Baron doesn't; I find I don't identify as readily with my betters or with people who have more attractive qualities than my own. Only with people who are worse.) Arthur Baron never mentions Derek to me. Andy Kagle does, and I hate him for it. (I could have killed him when he showed up at the house Sunday without invitation to tell me, unctuously and pretentiously, that it was God's will. I wanted to hit him too.) I resent it blazingly when anyone talks to me about him (and want to kill them), although I also hope that everyone in the world will join together soon at the identical moment to tell me:
"Give the kid away."
That isn't going to happen.
I don't have to poll the members of my family to find out what we want. Even my fair-haired, lovable, good-hearted, sensitive boy, who is appalled by the alternatives, really doesn't mean it when he pleads:
"Don't."
He means:
"Please."
"But please whisk him away too swiftly for the eye to see or the mind to record and remember."
Kagle called from the filling station in town with the lie he just happened to be driving through and would like to say hello to the family. He looked haggard. There were sleepless shadows under his eyes and it was all he could do to force even a nervous smile.
"You hear things," he confided. "This time I'm really worried. Has anyone said anything about me?"
"I hear you've been to Toledo again."
"They aren't even talking to me about the convention. By now they usually give me a theme."
"Maybe they don't have one."
"I have to meet with Horace White. With him and Arthur Baron. I never have anything to do with Horace White."
"Maybe he's got some ideas."
"Two on one," Kagle chirps at me with a wink, as soon as my wife starts back into the house again.
"Coons?"
He misses my irony.
"Not for me. Not in Toledo. I've got good connections there. You ought to tag along sometime. I'll take good care of you."
"Should I ask him to stay for dinner?" my wife asks.
"Don't."
"He looks so unhappy."
"He wants to drive around."
"I don't even care," Kagle says, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth, drying his lips. "I'm getting tired of doing the same thing anyway. Where's the kids? I'd like to say hello to them before I go."
"Out playing."
"What about the little one? The one with the brain damage?"
"He's resting. He has to."
"You know, you shouldn't blame yourself about your boy," Kagle tells me, twisting himself back into his car. "I don't blame myself about my leg. It was God's will."
"Sure, Andy," I reply with a nasty smile, gritting my teeth. "And you don't worry about your job. If you lose it, it's God's will."
"Heh-heh," he comments hollowly.
"Heh-heh."
"Why didn't you let him stay?" my wife asks.
"I didn't want him."
It is God's will.
I've got Kagle's job.
"You were with Andy Kagle today," my wife says.
"How can you tell?"
"You're walking with a limp. Is his leg getting worse?"
"No, why?"
"His limp is worse than ever. You're almost staggering."
I straighten myself from a position characteristic of one of Kagle's and lean in a slouch of my own against the newel post of the staircase leading to the second floor.